


it isn't right for me to paint your picture every night (but I do)

by KathrynShadow



Series: Love Bites [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Harley Quinn (2017), Batman: The Animated Series
Genre: Alfred is very tired, Denial, F/M, Pining, Prequel, denial of pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 20:33:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13442853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: Harley Quinn laughs during sex, at least some of the time—not out of spite, not in a mocking way, but seemingly just because that’s how her body reacts to the tension—and he can’t not know that, can’t not remember that. But he never really got to find out what her mouth tasted like, and maybe that shouldn’t bother him, but it does.





	it isn't right for me to paint your picture every night (but I do)

**Author's Note:**

> look guys it's actually a oneshot for real this time!! INCREDIBLE
> 
> anyway so I didn't realize there was an epilogue comic, but I've just read it, and there's an entire issue comprised of nothing but Dick moping around and I just... I had to, guys.
> 
> Title stolen from Ludo's Hum Along, because I am allergic to titles that aren't also song lyrics. Apparently. I'm sorry.

Dick isn’t pining. Pining is… ludicrous—insane, even; there isn’t anything to pine _about_ (half an hour of fun, she’d called it? Hardly anything worth getting worked up over except to briefly relive alone when his mind starts wandering in that direction). So he isn't, no matter how many long-suffering glances from Alfred or skeptical brow-furrows from Bruce he gets.

It hadn't even been anything particularly life-changing. Not that it had been _bad;_ far from it—he'd definitely enjoyed himself more than he should have was expecting to, and she seemed pretty happy with the experience herself, but it was still just sex. Unplanned, unexpectedly kinky, _very good,_ but he hadn't felt himself falling desperately in love with her the second she got his pants off or anything.

Maybe he thinks about it more than he really should, but what's he supposed to do? He's been knocked out and tied to things by attractive women (and men, but for some reason the male supervillains of Gotham don't tend to run particularly pretty) so many times it's practically routine, and it hadn't led to anything more exciting than rope burn _before._ Hell, he'd been tied up by Harley before and it had only been frightening. (...mostly.) It's still a little difficult to figure out how exactly it had ended up happening at all.

(Dick won't lie and say that he didn't have some concerns at first. Lots of concerns. An entire boatload of concerns. But as much as she could have done without his input before he could have freed himself, as terrifyingly unorthodox as it was to proposition someone you'd poisoned and stomped on only a few minutes before, she still made sure to ask. Maybe it was a dumb gamble to make with anyone else, but he got the feeling that she'd been taken advantage of enough that she wouldn't want to cross the sexual assault line, and he'd… he'd really _wanted_ to say yes. So he did. The Poison Ivy-shaped bargaining chip was just a bonus, really.)

So. Confusing, good, useful for quietly getting himself off when he wanted to. That's it.

(Harley Quinn laughs during sex, at least some of the time—not out of spite, not in a mocking way, but seemingly just because that’s how her body reacts to the tension—and he can’t not know that, can’t not remember that. But he never really got to find out what her mouth tasted like, and maybe that shouldn’t bother him, but it does.)

He worries about her. That's fine; that's downright reasonable, given the kinds of things she’s historically gotten into.

Supervillains (and mediocrevillains, which honestly seems closer to the truth most of the time) of all kinds have been flirting with him for years. Of course Dick finds himself getting tired of it; it’s _tiring._ And if he also finds himself reminiscing while he’s getting tired of it, well—at least Harley went about it differently, and even if it was still technically unsolicited, it definitely wasn’t… out of _nowhere,_ exactly. And it hadn’t been her plan either (not that she planned much, from what he knows of her), so it was especially fine. It’s not that he—

He just preferred it when it was her. There’s no need to overthink it.

* * *

“I would have thought you’d be back in Blüdhaven by now,” Bruce comments one evening as he’s pulling on his gauntlets.

Dick shrugs and uses his boots as an excuse not to look at him. So as to avoid the possibility of Bruce just… deciding what he wants to see in his face and going ahead and seeing it. Not because of other reasons. “Looked like you could use my help a little longer, that’s all,” he says. “I had some vacation to burn through anyway.”

“Hm,” says Batman, and Dick feels thirteen again the way that single not-even-a-syllable gets his hackles up.

“You want me to go home, all you have to do is ask,” he says, maybe a little more defensively than he meant to.

“I know,” Batman answers, and pulls his cowl over his eyes.

Nightwing pulls a face at him behind his mask as soon as his back is turned.

* * *

He can’t ask Bruce about her, or he’ll just sit there and start assuming things beyond the friendly ( _friendly!!_ ) concern that’s actually behind the question. The same went for Alfred, and he would actually be direct about it, which was way worse. Trying to find her and talk to her wouldn’t exactly be respecting her apparent wish to be left alone; trying to find her and _not_ talk to her would give him the overwhelming urge to arrest himself (because even if the vast majority of his moonlighting gig involved stalking, it was the stalking of people who A. were currently involved in criminal activity somehow and B. had never seen him naked).

There’s still the Computer, though. He uses a separate case that they’re working as an excuse to look at it without arousing suspicion; when Bruce heads upstairs, Dick pulls up half a dozen semi-related files alongside Harley’s.

 _Floronic Man (prev. Dr. Jason Woodrue):_ whereabouts unknown; last spotted in Louisiana, on fire. Fair enough; Dick hadn’t really expected much development on that front.

 _Poison Ivy (prev. Dr. Pamela Lillian Isley): Arkham patient, being strongly considered for work release._ (And somehow, most of the world is still convinced that Batman is a terrifyingly heartless bastard. Sure, he’s a pain in the ass, he forgets how to act human around his allies half the time, but he’s got the gooiest center of anyone Dick’s ever known. It just… doesn’t always feel worth the effort trying to find it.)

 _Swamp Thing (prev. Dr. Alec Holland): still existent. Impractical as regular ally._ Nightwing tries not to snort.

_Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel (prev. Harley Quinn): Paroled, undergoing rehabilitation (primarily self-guided). Consider for WE employment to decrease odds of relapse. Note: Surprisingly helpful in extinction-level events._

Scanning the rest of the file brings up nothing further that Dick doesn’t know himself. He closes it second to last and gets back to work, not even completely sure what he was expecting to find in there.

(At least she must be mostly okay. Dick doesn’t think Batman _wouldn’t_ tell him if she’d vanished, or died, or something, but—well, it’s not like he has much of a reason to care beyond idle curiosity, so there’s no reason to expect constant updates here.)

* * *

Four days after he normally would have been heading home, Nightwing spots Harley from a rooftop as he’s about to grapnel across the street, and he nearly falls off the damn building trying to get out of sight.

Option A: Pretend he didn’t see her and keep going. (Except she actually looks _up_ from time to time, and she knows what a grappling hook settling into concrete sounds like, and she’d have no reason to think that he really was just passing by.)

Option B: Wait for her to get out of sight and then keep going. (Except doing that would involve watching her go—and, again, she actually looks up.)

Option C: Get down to the street, see if he can’t ask her how she’s—

Nightwing shakes his head and jogs back across the roof to circle around. He’ll lag a little behind Batman, but if he’s quick it won’t be bad enough that it’s questionable.

(What the everliving hell is _wrong_ with him?)

* * *

“You could always call the lady,” Alfred says dryly for the third time this week; and, for the third time this week, Dick has to make a concentrated effort not to choke a little.

“That’s not—” he says. “Is it so hard to believe I just missed you guys?”

“I suppose not,” Alfred allows, but of course can’t just leave it at that and let it be. “It is somewhat hard to believe that you missed us enough to move back in. Gotham isn’t so terribly far from Blüdhaven that you can’t make the trip in an hour.” He doesn’t quite wrinkle his nose, but he looks like he wants to. “Or half an hour, if you drive like Master Bruce does.”

* * *

Dick heads back home the following day. For the blip of a moment, he considers making a detour just to see how she’s doing, see if she’s working; she doesn’t know what he looks like in his civvies, for all she’d know he had no idea the place existed and was weirded out that it did (which, frankly, he still kind of is), it wouldn’t—

He drives straight home instead.

* * *

He stops thinking about her, for the most part. Sometimes there’s a flash of red and black and blonde out of the corner of his eye, or the cadence of a laugh, or the smell of maybe-cinnamon, and that gets his attention for a second; but it’s just a second. It was fun, it was nice; he stops regretting that it’s over so much as he starts being quietly content that it happened in the first place. Life returns to normal—or as close to it as his life ever gets, anyway.

Two months pass. He finds the rooftop.

"Huh," he says.

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to ProtoDan as always. and also y'all. <3
> 
> addendum to my previous Which Multi-Chapter Thing Do Next question!
> 
> 1\. Modified the cinematic one; realized that the entire plot could happen without the Tinder AU aspect, so that bit's gone. It'd be Dick!POV and of an Unknown Length!  
> 2\. Robin!Harley is the same as it was before, but if y'all want to see anyone show up besides the Joker (because character development, dammit!!) let me know! I only have like 30% of a plot right now, so... suggestions welcome. XD  
> 3\. During a vicious marathon of the animated series (which I only started watching last year because I missed the bus on a lot of things that were happening during my childhood on account of being distracted by Star Trek), I had a weird thought of A. what if he was starting college around the same time as she was finishing it (which by the way how the everliving hell did she get a doctorate before the show even started if she's shown as being around Dick's age and Dick is still in college when she's running around with the Joker HOW FAST DID YOU GO THROUGH SCHOOL, HARLEY) and B. what if they ran into each other, and that somehow ran into a brief fake dating thing which then took a sudden right turn into angst. And then some kind of happy ending eventually, knowing me, but angst first. It's important.


End file.
